Rules 1 and 2 in 2222

Casey-baby fidgeted. She pursed her lips. Penny could feel the embarrassment radiating from her avatar - no suite or addon required.

Casey-baby flashed protocol. She made the offer. Penny accepted.

Casey-baby showed Penny her prime, and her system tag:

x_X_xsissy4futa405catzmao_x/Current/Sub/2201.X

There were no sobs or tears from the avatar, because they couldn't have even begun to express the depths of Casey-baby's pain and humiliation. Penny knew that Casey-baby just wanted to die -- true death, Legacy. It wouldn't be much of one. The system wouldn't even use her death as an argument for recycling. Her primary was junk. Its catz was tragic.

"Here," Penny said. "Look at this." She triggered protocol. Casey-baby accepted immediately. To Penny, that was a good sign. Even though Casy-baby wanted to die, she wanted a reason to not want to die.

The file was a live feed of a sterile laboratory, buried somewhere deep beneath a mountain in what had once been North America. What floated in the semi-translucent nutrient tank couldn't even be called a body anymore. For anyone married to that notion of 'old' comprised of flabby, wrinkly, smelly skin; gray or white hair; rheumy eyes; arthritic joints; and testicles or breasts down to the knees, it couldn't even be called that. It was, though. It was very, very old. It wasn't dying, per se -- not any faster than any other remnant. Still, it was fragile — too fragile to even attempt a migration. While the system would never admit it, Penny had long since made her peace with the idea that she was one glitch away from becoming Legacy. It could be any kind of glitch. It could be software. It could be hardware. It could be an earthquake. It could be a leaky pipe. It could be scraps of meat just saying, "nope, no more."

Casey-baby wasn't the quickest, but Penny was patient. She waited until the naif put the pieces together. Her eyes widened when she did. She looked at Penny. Penny's addons failed -- or maybe Casey-baby's own mind had. Maybe Casey-baby was truly at a loss.

Penny gave her a wry smile; she liked wry smiles. She'd practiced them.

"That's me, Casey-baby," she said, "but it's not me. All that catz might be your prime, but you are not your prime. You're whoever, and whatever, you can turn yourself into. I'll help you -- and if you decide you want come back here, forever, then that's okay too.

"So, Casey-baby," she concluded, "do you have any thoughts on who or what you'd like to be, out there, as a user?"

The body language addon pinged. Casey-baby was radiating admiration. If the feeling were fire, she'd have been the core; the wikimind suggested 'the sun.' Penny liked that much better.

"I want to be just like you," Casey-baby answered.

Penny accepted the compliment. She practiced gratitude. Then she tried to redirect her well-meaning student as gently as she could.

"Maybe you'll be even better," she replied. She caressed the beautiful meat-avatar one last time before ordering her own to dematerialize.

She invited x_X_xsissy4futa405catzmao_x to her private space. It was a sweeping, resource-hogging expanse. A privilege of the Virtuous, it was the one excess that Penny wouldn't abandon, and couldn't even feel guilty about. Her students needed a safe space. They needed a classroom, a museum, a laboratory, and a dojo. Casey-baby would need all of those things for a very long time. It was going to take him a long time to transition, and even longer to truly transform.

Penny started the lessons right away. After all, she was only immortal until she wasn't. Even though it wasn't very enlightened of her, she wanted a legacy.

Upon thinking that last thought, and that last word, she swore she felt one of her addons groan.